Community – Being Human 75human brain is the most creative- enabling the human being to modify
habitats, with tools designed both for good and for ill. Humans have the
capacity to improve their environment, but they also destroy, as has
happened especially since 1850, through industrial pollution, deforesta-
tion, urbanization, large-scale agriculture, mining, petroleum extraction
and combustion, and so on.
Human individuals are social mammals that cannot survive for long
in total isolation. The sociality of humans is consolidated in community-
through which a child learns and internalizes attitudes, norms, princi-
ples, values, ethics, ethos and world-view. Individualism has become
normative in Euro-American society. Whereas in the past parents in
community shared the duty of cultivating responsible adulthood among
their children, this task has been taken over by the State, the Media and
the advertising industry. Public opinion is no longer shaped though
family and community deliberations. Nor does religion provide binding
codes of conduct as used to happen in the past. Liberalization of religion
has made membership in a religion, denomination or sect a matter of
“choice”, rather than a duty integral to one’s communal identity. Liber-
alism during the twentieth century made religious adherence optional
rather than normative. Individual interests have eroded communal iden-
tity resulting in breakdown of social cohesion. Under this “free-for-all”
setting, public opinion is manipulated through the media channels by
politicians, entrepreneurs, musicians and religious leaders. Truth is no
longer what the sacred scriptures affirm, nor what ancestors taught. Ra-
ther it is what opinion polls favour most.
In the African context the colonization of African peoples after the
Berlin Conference (1884-85) comprised vicious denigration of their cul-
tural and religious heritage, usurpation of their ancestral lands, destruc-
tion of their economy and environment, imposition of alien norms and
values under the pretext of civilization, and introduction of competing
brands of Christianity as the only valid channels to eternal salvation.